PM 5 and png's

[xtine]

Hi,

I'm a graphic designer, a digital artist and a amateur photographer.

I design digital art for digital scrapbooking. The file standard in digital scrapbooking is .jpg for backgrounds/papers, .png's for elements/clip art and .psd for layered templates.
The amount of single files I have will run into the 80,000 or more and that is not including my photos.
I desperately need a DAM to organize my files. I already have a folder structure set up that represents my workflow.(even took classes on that ;-))

I tried out the demo version of PM 4.6.9 and had high hopes. Unfortunately the .png's did not show up properly like the problem is with a lot of other DAM software. I know, my Software Architect husband explained it to me, that this is a png alpha channel transparency problem.

I hope and pray that this is solved in PM 5. There is a whole world of digital scrapbooking artists/designers that are just as desperately looking for DAM software as I do.
The way some of them work now is convert all png's to tiff and than import them into Lightroom or Aperture. But as you can imagine the conversion will increase the size of the files at least 3 fold unless you can choose the way the tiff files are written.(Little or Big Endian) Most software does not give you that option.

I'm not looking forward to, as a last resort, converting at least 40,000 files to tiff, there must be another solution and I hope that solution will come with Photo mechanic 5.  Can you please enlighten me? If the answer is no, than I'm open to other suggestions.

[Kirk Baker]

PM 5 won't convert your images to TIFFs.  It doesn't import images.  It browses images where they lie.  It also doesn't do anything special with the alpha channel and as such draws them incorrectly when viewed as thumbnails or previews.  It is entirely cosmetic.  Your PNGs are not modified in any way by PM and if you have PM launch them into an editing application such as Photoshop, you'll see that your image is perfectly fine.

-Kirk

[xtine]

Thanks for your answer Kirk. I don't think you understood my question.

I do understand all what you write and I know PM does not change my images and neither do I want it to convert to tiff.

When I am designing I need to make decisions based on what I see in PM when I look for certain images(png's). When a png is displayed incorrectly with extra pixels I can't make a decision weather I am going us that image in a design or not. I'm sure you understand. if this were photos, a photographer would like to see a correct image of his photo before he decides to use that photo or not.

I know it can be done because there are a few photo/image managers that do show a png correctly. CSE Bridge and PSE Organizer, ACDSee for instance.

So my question was if in PM 5 the problem with the alpha transparency channel wrt .png was going to be fixed.  But you already gave me that answer and I guess I will have to look for another solution.